At some point in the quite-near future, two major individual records are going to fall in Russia’s KHL, and they’re going to fall to the same man. Vadim Shipachyov (or Shipachev) is 37 now, and his last couple of seasons at Ak Bars have seen a fairly significant drop-off in his once-prodigious point totals. This past summer, he moved to Dinamo Minsk, and with no disrespect at all intended towards the proud old Belarusan club, it’s the first time in more than a decade that Shipachyov is not suiting up for one or another of the KHL’s perennial giants.
For a brief moment at the beginning of the 2017-18 season, you may recall, Vadim Shipachyov was a Vegas Golden Knight. Not that hockey fans in the desert have much reason to remember that episode fondly; Shipachyov’s NHL career numbers stand at three games played and one goal scored, followed by a team suspension and eventual cancellation of contract for refusing to report to the AHL. Within a month of the beginning of his first and only NHL season, he was back in the KHL.
And now Shipachyov approaches, as mentioned, two major KHL milestones. First of all, he trails the legendary Sergei Mozyakin by only six points (928 to 922) for the league’s all-time record in that category (all numbers in this article are through September 16th, 2024). Purists may grouse that it has taken “Shipa” 150 more games to get there than it did Mozyakin, but any time that you come close to a scoring record set by the former Metallurg Magnitogorsk great it’s an accomplishment whatever the circumstances.
At about the same time that he catches Mozyakin for points (barring injury etc. etc.), Shipachyov will also become the KHL’s all-time leader in games played. He has currently taken to the ice 992 times, putting him 11 games behind recently-retired defensive defenceman Evgeny Biryukov. Biryukov was a team-mate of Mozyakin’s at Metallurg for a number of seasons, before finishing his career with four seasons with Salavat Yulaev Ufa. He was an old-school blueliner, as his stat-line of 24-125-149 in 1001 games will illustrate.
There have been murmurs, and his brief stint in Las Vegas does little to contradict them, that Vadim Shipachyov can be a difficult character at times, but there can be no denying that he has had a very fine KHL career. He’s taken part in all 17 seasons of the KHL, with stints at Severstal Cherepovets, SKA St. Petersburg (where he won the Gagarin Cup twice), Dynamo Moscow, and Ak Bars before this summer’s move to Minsk. Where Mozyakin was something of an all-rounder, Shipachyov’s forte has been the playmaking; he is the KHL’s all-time leader in assists with 633, more than 100 ahead of second-place Mozyakin’s 509. As he closes in on those two marks we are entitled to wonder, I think, what might have been had Shipachyov been able to make an NHL home for himself in the Mojave Desert.
Patrick Conway is a writer based in Peterborough, Ontario. He previously covered Russian hockey at the Conway’s Russian Hockey blog, and he still keeps an eye on goings-on in that area.
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